MACMILLAN LITERARY COMPANIONS A COLERIDGE COMPANION

Transcription

1 A CONRAD COMPANION

2 MACMILLAN LITERARY COMPANIONS J. R. Hammond AN H. G. WELLS COMPANION AN EDGAR ALLAN POE COMPANION A GEORGE ORWELL COMPANION A ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON COMPANION John Spencer Hill A COLERIDGE COMPANION Norman Page A DICKENS COMPANION A KIPLING COMPANION A CONRAD COMPANION F. B. Pinion A HARDY COMPANION A BRONTE COMPANION A JANE AUSTEN COMPANION A D. H. LAWRENCE COMPANION A WORDSWORTH COMPANION A GEORGE ELIOT COMPANION A TENNYSON COMPANION Further titles in preparation Series Standing Order If you would like to receive future titles in this series as they are published, you can make use of our standing order facility. To place a standing order please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address and the name of the series. Please state with which title you wish to begin your standing order. (If you live outside the UK we may not have the rights for your area, in which case we will forward your order to the publisher concerned.) Standing Order Service, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hants RG21 2XS, England.

3 A CONRAD COMPANION NORMAN PAGE

4 * Norman Page 1986 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition Ali rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or t ransmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WlT 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act Published by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 17S Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin's Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillane is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN / ISBN (ebook) This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

5 To Barnaby

6 Contents List of Plates List of Maps Priface A Conrad Chronology A Conrad Who's Who Conrad's World Poland France England Africa The East Conrad Observed Conrad's Languages The Novels A/mayer's Folly An Outcast of the Islands The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' Lord jim Nostromo The Secret Agent Under Western Eyes Chance Victory The Shadow-Line The Arrow of Gold The Rescue The Rover Suspense lx X Xl Vll

7 vm Contents The Sisters 134 Short Stories 135 Tales of Unrest 135 Youtk: A Narrative and Two Otker Stories 139 Typhoon and Otker Stories 146 A Set of Six 153 'Twixt Land and Sea 156 Within Ike Tides 161 Th~of~~ 1~ Collaborations 165 Non-Fictional Prose 168 Plays 173 Filmography 175 Select Bibliography 177 Index 182

8 List of Plates and Maps PLATES 1 Conrad as a child ( 1863) 2 Conrad's father, Apollo Korzeniowski, in Conrad in 1874 (aged about 16) 4 Conrad in 1883 (aged 25) 5 Conrad in 1896 (aged about 38) 6 Conrad in 1912 (aged about 54) 7 Conrad in 1923 (aged about 65) 8 Bust ofconrad by Jacob Epstein 9 Portrait of Conrad by Walter Tittle 10 'Somewhere in the Pacific': caricature of Conrad by Max Beerbohm (1920) 11 Edward Garnett 12 R. B. Cunninghame Graham (etching by William Strang, 1898) 13 Jessie George in Marguerite Poradowska 15 The Torrens (seep. 8) 16 The Roi des Belges (seep. 7) MAPS Map 1 Poland at the time of Conrad's birth 36 Map 2 The river Congo 42 Map 3 Conrad's sea voyages, Maps 1 and 3 are reproduced from Karl and Davies (eds), The Collected Letters of joseph Conrad, vol. 1, by courtesy of the Cambridge University Press. Map 2 is reproduced from N. Sherry, Conrad's Western World, by courtesy of the Cambridge University Press. lx

9 Acknowledgements The author and publishers wish to thank the following who have kindly given permission for the use of copyright material: The Mansell Collection, for plates 1, 3, 8, 9 and 12; The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, for plates 2 and 5; The National Library ofwarsaw, for plate 4; the Estate of john Conrad, for plates 6 (photography by William Cadby) and 7 (photograph by T. and R. Annan and Sons); Sir Rupert Hart-Davis/Mrs Eva Reichmann, for plate 10; Richard Garnett, for plate 11; University of Texas Library, for plate 13; Duke University Library, North Carolina (the Virginia Grey Fund), for plate 14; The National Maritime Museum, for plate 15; and Norman Sherry, for plate 16. Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright holders but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity. X

10 Preface The case of joseph Conrad has many unusual features, and there are some aspects that may fairly be described as unique. Most obviously, he is, as M. C. Bradbrook put it long ago, 'Poland's English genius': other authors such as Nabokov and Beckett have written extensively in a language other than their native tongue, but Conrad is remarkable both for having written only in English and for having begun to learn English, which was not even his second language, at a relatively advanced age. Eventually he settled in England; adopted- or, according to his own account, was adopted by - the English language; married an Englishwoman; fathered sons who were brought up as English boys; and had a circle offriends who were largely English or English-speaking. Yet, as some of the evidence cited in the sections below titled 'Conrad Observed' and 'Conrad's Languages' suggests, he remained to the end of his life very much the foreigner in speech and manners; and this is an important factor in arriving at an understanding of his temperament and outlook. Like his contemporaries Henry James and Rudyard Kipling, he was both an insider and an outsider in relation to the English scene. His short story 'Amy Foster' is a moving allegory ofhis own experience, and when he fell ill Conrad, like Janko in that story (whose name is a near-anagram of'j. Konrad'), reverted to Polish in his delirium. But becoming an author was for Conrad a new start at a time when most men have long made their choices for life. In his thirty-eighth year when his first book appeared, he had behind him a career - not unsuccessful, though less successful than he sometimes liked to imply- as a merchant seaman. Work, duty, responsibility, solidarity: these and other key-concepts of Conrad's moral world as expressed in his fiction have nothing abstract XI

11 Xll Priface or academic about them but are drawn from nearly twenty years at sea. Yet Conrad, it is clear, was far from being a typical mariner: apart from anything else, his origins in the Polish s;:.lackta or ruling class, partly manifested in an aristocratic courtliness of manner and a punctiliousness over dress and personal appearance, marked him off from his fellows. When he turned to writing, it was inevitable that he should draw on his memories of ships and sailors; and indeed, having little else to draw on, he had little choice. For his experience, so rich in some areas, had been remarkably limited in others. He knew the oceans, the life of sailors, sailing and steam vessels, and many of the world's ports; but oflife ashore, of occupations other than seafaring, of social or family life, and of the female half of the human race, his knowledge was severely restricted, and his early writings - welcomed by contemporaries as opening up new fictional territory - are also notable for what they leave out or avoid. Understandably, Conrad himself sometimes became exasperated when reviewers and readers showed signs of typecasting him as a writer of sea-stories and purveyor of exotic backgrounds: a sort of latter-day blend of Captain Marryat and Robert Louis Stevenson, or of Pierre Loti and Rudyard Kipling. As he told a correspondent in 1906, 'They want to banish me to the middle of the ocean'; and later, when a collected edition of his works was being prepared, he insisted that 'all reference to the sea' should be avoided and made it clear that he did not wish to be offered to the public as 'a writer of the sea - or even of the tropics'. In 1917 he told Sidney Colvin: Perhaps you won't find it presumptuous if, after 22 years of work, I may say that I have not been very well understood. I have been called a writer of the sea, of the tropics, a descriptive writer, a romantic writer- and also a realist. But as a matter of fact all my concern has been with the 'ideal' value of things, events and people. That and nothing else... Near the end of his life he told Richard Curle that 'in the body of my work barely one-tenth is what may be called sea stuff'. The tendency to regard him as primarily a writer of 'sea stuff' is not altogether a thing of the past; and it is important to remember that, for Conrad, the Narcissus (for all the precision and authenticity of detail with which it is evoked) is a microcosm of the larger

12 Priface Xlll world; that Jim's leap from the Patna is a type of human action; and that the sailor's life is only a special case of universal experience, though it is true that certain qualities such as isolation and solidarity may be more acutely and dramatically manifested at sea than ashore. The pattern of Conrad's career as a writer, and the history ofhis reputation, are other curious features. Although his early work was praised by many reviewers, it did not sell; and the story of Conrad's chronic financial troubles and of the meagre rewards for creative efforts that at times drove him to a state of physical and mental collapse makes distressing reading. With Chance (1913) came success; but many of his critics have taken the view that by then, with only one or two exceptions, his period as a major artist was over. The 'achievement and decline' view of Conrad's career is persuasive, and certainly one would be reluctant to exchange a single page of Lord jim or The Secret Agent for the whole of a book such as The Arrow of Gold. Conrad wrote to his American publisher Doubleday in 1918: I am sufficient of a democrat to detest the idea of being a writer of any 'coterie' of some small self-appointed aristocracy in the vast domain of art or letters. As a matter of feeling- not as a matter of business- I want to be read by many eyes and by all kinds of them, at last... It is an irony ofconradian bitterness and intensity that he could, in his lifetime, reach 'many eyes and... all kinds of them' only after his work had sunk to a level little above that of mediocrity. In the sixty years since Conrad's death, however, justice has been done to the earlier and finer work, and he is now acknowledged as one of the major figures of modernism and as one who, even before the nineteenth century ended, was hard at work remaking the novel and (in, for instance, The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' and Heart of Darkness) extending the possibilities of fiction. He is in our time one of the most widely studied and intensively discussed of modern authors, and in recent years there have been several contributions to Conrad scholarship and criticism that have significantly added to our knowledge and modified our understanding ofhis life, personality and writings. I refer to such works as the first instalment of Ian Watt's long-meditated and long-awaited critical and biographical study

13 XlV Priface Conrad in the Nineteenth Century ( 1980), the first volume of the collected edition of Conrad's letters (The Collected Letters of joseph Conrad, Volume 1, , ed. Frederick R. Karl & Laurence Davies ( 1983)), and what must now be regarded as the definitive biography, Zdzislaw Najder'sjoseph Conrad: a Chronicle {1983), hereafter referred to, frequendy and gratefully, as 'Najder'. It has long been known that Conrad was an unreliable guide to his own past history, but Najder's exhaustively researched and fully documented study makes clear, as never before, the extraordinary extent of his lapses of memory, his self-deceptions, and what in some instances can only be regarded as his lies. Again and again, Najder sets the record straight. The autobiographical A Personal Record, which Conrad described as 'absolutely genuine', recounts his three examinations in order to qualify first as a ship's officer and then as a master, but says nothing of the failures that were also part ofhis record. 'Haven't I commanded an Australian ship for over two years?' boasted Conrad in Certainly not, retorts Najder: the command was of'a small barque with a crew of nine' and lasted for fourteen months. Recalling his childhood in Poland, he states that he spent the last eighteen months of his father's life with him in Cracow; actually the period was four months. N ajder' s chronicle is shot through with similar examples. We now know- what many had long suspected- that Conrad passed off as a duelling wound what was actually the result of a suicide attempt; that he invented the story of an accident suffered on board the Annie Frost (on which he never served); and that whereas he claimed that Edward Garnett had urged him to begin a second novel, An Outcast of the Islands had been begun before his meeting with Garnett. All this means that great caution is necessary in dealing with Conrad's statements: he is notoriously unreliable about dates (to put it as charitably as possible), and even gets his son's birthday wrong. But it is not only in relation to Conrad's biography that these errors or deceptions are significant. For they represent part of a self-mythologizing process that proceeded from the desire to rewrite the story ofhis own life in more dramatic and heroic terms than reality justified. This tendency seems to have become second nature and was no doubt, in part at least, unconscious; and since the autobiographical element looms so large in the novels and stories, the process played an important role in the genesis and composition ofhis fiction. The whole question of the relationship

14 Priface XV between memory and invention, history and fiction, in Conrad's work is a more complex one than has sometimes been supposed; and we need to take with a good pinch of salt his rather insistent and unqualified claims for the authenticity ofhis material- when, for example, he describes 'Youth' as 'a feat of memory' and 'a record of experience', or The Shadow-Line as 'exact autobiography'. Many of Conrad's embellishments of the truth were intended, consciously or otherwise, to transform the random and accidental happenings that make up a life into purposeful, meaningful, long-premeditated events: to turn a chronicle into a plot. Thus his becoming a British seaman is depicted by Conrad as the product of the slow workings of destiny, whereas it appears to have been largely a matter of chance. But all this would be of only minor psychological interest were it not that the activity extended into his creative life. As Najder points out, there is a continuity between the fictions of Conrad's life and the life of his fictions: 'The legend was an attempt to make his life meaningful. But Conrad's works as a whole... represent an attempt to find the meaning of human existence in general' (p. 494). In his recent Dickens and Women (1983), Michael Slater has described Dickens as 'a supreme dramatizer of his own past, adept at organizing its incidents into a coherent plot' (p. 113), and much the same can be said of Conrad- as it can, no doubt, of many other writers as well as of many of us who are not major novelists. As Frederick Crews pointed out in a review of Najder's biography in the New York Review of Books (1 March 1984), much of Conrad's fiction is, avowedly or otherwise, more or less autobiographical; but not only the fiction but also the non-fictional writings and the lettersand even the accounts of such members of Conrad's circle as Jessie Conrad and Ford Madox Ford- need to be approached very circumspectly. What Najder has achieved, very strikingly, is the 'demythification' of Conrad, replacing the self-dramatizing legend by objective biography based wherever possible on documentary evidence. All this adds up to a man and a writer full of fascination but also full of pitfalls for the unwary who approach the problems with uncritical reverence rather than sympathetic scepticism. The present volume attempts to provide a guide to Conrad's life, background and writings that embodies some of the findings of recent scholarship. It is intended both for the student who wishes

15 XVI Preface to acquaint himself with the outline of Conrad's career and to gain an overview of his work, and also for the reader who knows his Conrad but will often need to check a date, name or fact, and should find that the information he seeks lies more conveniently to hand than in critical or biographical studies not primarily organized as works of reference. The biographical sections- 'A Conrad Chronology', 'A Conrad Who's Who', 'Conrad's World', 'Conrad Observed', and 'Conrad's Languages'- are followed by sections devoted to his fictional and non-fictional writings, wherein the student and reader will find information on the genesis, composition, publication and reception of Conrad's books together with an indication of some of the main lines of interpretation, criticism and evaluation. Throughout (as, indeed, will be obvious) I have been greatly indebted to many of Conrad's biographers and critics, and especially to Jocelyn Baines, Albert Guerard, Douglas Hewitt, Zdzislaw Najder, Norman Sherry and Ian Watt, details of whose publications will be found in the Select Bibliography. I am grateful to Barnaby Page for compiling the filmography, and to Marguerite Meyers and her colleagues for help with typing. The author and publishers wish to thank the Cambridge University Press for permission to use an extract fromjohn Conrad, joseph Conrad: Times Remembered ( 1981 ).